Polling Data and Private Briefings: Paul Manafort, Pro-Kremlin Oligarchs, and Russian Intelligence
This article covers Paul Manafort’s communications with pro-Kremlin oligarchs while he was chairman of the Trump Campaign and his provision of internal polling data to Russian intelligence.
It is the third article in the series, “Black Caviar: Paul Manafort, Russia, and 2016 Trump Campaign.”
While it is not necessary to read earlier entries, it is recommended.
I published a series of articles covering Paul Manafort’s background as a lobbyist and political consultant, and his work in Ukraine prior to the 2016 election here.
The first article covers Manafort’s activities in post-Maidan Revolution Ukraine and his dual family/fiscal crisis.
The second article covers how Manafort was hired onto the Trump Campaign and his possible connections to the GRU’s hack-and-leak operation.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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Paul Manafort joined candidate Trump for dinner at Mar-a-Lago on March 24th, 2016, and five days later the campaign officially announced that Manafort had been hired.
That same day, March 29th, Rick Gates sent the alleged Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik an email with five attachments, four of which consisted of personal memoranda drafted by Gates and signed off by Manafort personally addressed to Oleg Deripaska and three Ukrainian members of the pro-Kremlin Opposition Bloc: Serhiy Lyovochkin, Rinat Akhmetov, and Akhmetov’s right hand man, Borys Kolesnikov.
As described in an earlier entry, all had been involved with Manafort’s activities in Ukraine.
Gates also included a press release announcing the Trump campaign’s hiring of Manafort for Kilimnik to translate and distribute.
“I am watching intently at the prospects of a new Ukraine government potentially forming in the coming days,” Manafort wrote in his memoranda to Lyovochkin, Akhmetov and Kolesnikov.
Manafort pitched the Ukrainians. “We should revisit this topic and think about how to best position the OB as the next majority party in parliament. As you have seen from the US election, anything is possible with the will of the people. I look forward to speaking with you soon.”
“I am hopeful that we are able to talk about this development with Trump where I can brief you in more detail,” Manafort wrote to his former top client, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, “I look forward to speaking with you soon.”
Read my description of Deripaska’s connections to Eurasian organized crime and how he met Paul Manafort here.
Manafort deputy Rick Gates, who also joined the Trump campaign, believed that Manafort was attempting to confirm that Deripaska was dropping the Pericles matter.
Pericles Global Markets was a private equity outfit established by Manafort and Deripaska that made a mysterious investment in a Ukrainian telecom company linked to allies of Viktor Yanukovych that may have been a means to launder money or conceal bribes.
Gates believed that Manafort didn’t need to address this explicitly in writing in the memo to Deripaska as he had already discussed the matter with Kilimnik.
Kilimnik had been aware of Manafort’s courting of the Trump campaign.
He spoke of the matter with an American political consultant who had worked with them in Ukraine, Sam Patten, before Manafort was officially hired, prompting Patten to believe that Kilimnik had communicated with Manafort about the Trump campaign.
“In late 2015, Lyovochkin asked me whether it was true that Trump was going to hire Manafort to run his campaign,” Patten wrote in Wired. “I told Lyovochkin that was an absurd notion; that Trump would have to be nuts to do such a thing.”
If Patten’s timeline is correct, Lyovochkin was aware of Manafort’s plans to join the Trump campaign months before Tom Barrack.
If the suspected Russian intelligence agent Kilimnik and pro-Kremlin oligarch Lyovochkin were aware of Manafort’s intentions to join the Trump campaign by late 2015, prior to him reaching out to the campaign itself, it seems a distinct possibility that Russian intelligence was aware as well.
“Dad and Trump are literally living in the same building and mom says they go up and down all day long hanging and plotting with each other,” Jessica Manafort wrote to her sister in an April 7th, 2016, text.
The sisters’ feelings about their father’s position on Trump’s campaign veered between disgust and pride. One of them described Manafort and Trump’s relationship as the “most dangerous friendship in America.”
“I assume you’ve shown our friends my media coverage, right?” Manafort wrote to Kilimnik on April 10th, 2016, referring to reports that he had joined the Trump campaign.
“Absolutely,” Kilimnik replied. “Everyone.”
“How do we use to get whole?” Manafort replied. “Has ovd [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”
“Yes,” Kilimnik responded. “I have been sending everything to Victor [Boyarkin], who has been forwarding the coverage directly to OVD.”
Deripaska’s Enforcer: Former GRU Officer Victor Boyarkin
Victor Boyarkin is described by the US Treasury Department as “a former GRU officer who reports directly to Deripaska and has led business negotiations on Deripaska’s behalf.”
The Senate Intelligence report described Boyarkin as “a Russian intelligence officer affiliated with the GRU.”
Throughout the 1990s, Boyarkin served at Russian embassies in the United States and Mexico, where he dealt in military affairs.
By the 2000’s, Boyarkin worked for Deripaska’s company Rusal, where he negotiated with foreign dictators to gain access to natural resources for the Russian metals company.
Boyarkin had known Manafort ever since they worked together on Deripaska’s behalf in Montenegro in 2006.
Manafort and Boyarkin worked together again for Deripaska between 2008–2009 in Equatorial Guinea.
One of the poorest countries in the world, Guinea is home to roughly one third of the world’s bauxite ore, the primary source of aluminum. Deripaska’s mining interests in-country were considerable and of vital importance to his aluminum company Rusal.
After the death of the country’s longtime dictator, a military coup was followed by promises of an election. Deripaska sent the seasoned intelligence professional Boyarkin to protect his interests and Manafort to run an American style campaign for their preferred candidate.
Rick Gates, who worked alongside Manafort, Kilimnik and Boyarkin in Guinea, claimed that Boyarkin enjoyed high level contacts with the government and later was able to arrange for a Russian military ship to arrive in the area after the candidate they were supporting in the presidential election was nearly assassinated by a rival.
“He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin told Time in late 2018, referring to his interactions with Manafort during the 2016 campaign. “And he was offering ways to pay it back.”
Boyarkin stated that he had been tasked by Deripaska with collecting the money Manafort owed him.
“I came down hard on him,” Boyarkin claimed.
Konstantin Kilimnik Provides Internal Trump Campaign Polling Data to Russian Intelligence
The full extent of the communications between Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik are not publicly available. Contemporaneous with their email correspondence, they also used encrypted applications such as Viber, Signal, and WhatsApp to communicate.
In addition to encrypted apps, Manafort and Kilimnik engaged in the practice of foldering, which consists of writing email drafts without sending them in a shared email account where two parties can read messages without ever having sent them. They used code words such as check the “tea bag” or the “updated travel schedule” to indicate when there were new messages to be read.
No known communications between Manafort and Kilimnik have ever been uncovered for the period between April 11th and May 6th, 2016, though they may have communicated over encrypted apps. There are, however, indications that the two were in contact.
On April 21st, Oleg Deripaska arrived in Newark Airport on a private jet. It appears that he was traveling on a Russian diplomatic passport and visited the UN to attend the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement. Deripaska departed three days later on the 24th and it is not known whether he had any communications with Manafort during this period.
On April 22nd, Kilimnik sent a series of emails to an associate in which he claimed that Manafort had a “clever plan” to defeat Hillary Clinton. Kilimnik expressed confidence that Trump would win, describing Manafort as a good strategist and claiming that, even in American politics, there could be surprises.
Kilimnik reiterated that Manafort was confident that Trump would win and had “a clever plan of screwing Clinton.”
In a May 5th email to Gates, Manafort wrote that Kilimnik was “coming to D.C. for a wedding” and that he “wanted to meet up.”
Later investigators were unable to determine how Manafort knew about Kilimnik’s trip, nor has any evidence surfaced that Kilimnik did in fact attend a wedding at this time. Manafort and Kilimnik’s habitual use of coded language has led some to speculate that Manafort meant something else by “wedding.”
After arriving in D.C. on the 5th, the next evening Kilimnik visited the “Off the Record” bar in the basement of the Hay Adams hotel, across the street from the White House. He appears to have had drinks with, among others, Jonathan Finer, the chief of staff to then-Secretary of State John Kerry.
Kilimnik was apparently unimpressed or disagreed with Finer’s views on Ukraine and wrote in a later email that he had met with “Finer or whatever the fuck is his name. In total space.”
That same evening Kilimnik communicated with Manafort and Gates to arrange a 7:30am meeting the next morning with Manafort at the Peninsula Hotel in New York.
At the meeting, Manafort described his vision for Trump’s path to victory and the margins by which he thought Trump might win. He did so with the understanding that Kilimnik would pass the information to their contacts in Russia and Ukraine, including Oleg Deripaska. Kilimnik returned to D.C. after the meeting.
Gates and Kilimnik spoke over the phone at 5:26pm, before Kilimnik departed from Washington Dulles at 6:50pm.
Shortly after Gates and Kilimnik’s 13-minute phone call, Gates spoke with Roger Stone over the phone for 34 minutes. It remains unknown what Gates and Stone spoke about or if it had to do with Kilimnik’s meeting with Manafort that morning.
Kilimnik later told Sam Patten that he and Manafort had discussed whether Trump “[has] a shot; if he has a shot, why.”
The next day, May 8th, Patten flew to Kyiv to meet with Kilimnik.
Shortly thereafter, Manafort instructed Gates to send Kilimnik internal Trump campaign polling data, which he expected to be forwarded on to Deripaska and other oligarchs in Ukraine including Lyovochkin and Akhmetov.
The polling data was prepared by Tony Fabrizio, a pollster who had worked with Manafort in Ukraine.
Gates sent Kilimnik “topline” data, which included information such as the states polled, the dates the polls took place, and the voter information gathered (i.e., how many are undecided, decided GOP, etc.). Gates copied and pasted the information from Fabrizio summaries to messages he sent Kilimnik via the encrypted WhatsApp and then deleted the messages daily.
According to the US Treasury Department, Kilimnik shared the polling data with Russian intelligence.
The polling data generated by Fabrizio, the Trump campaign’s primary pollster, was highly valued by the campaign. According to Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign digital director, 98% of the campaign’s resource allocation was determined by polling and data.
Manafort took polling very seriously, and on several occasions emphasized that the data they generated should not be shared, describing it as “sensitive stuff.”
At the end of one email Manafort received containing Fabrizio’s polling data, he wrote, “I don’t want these results shared with anyone outside of the recipients of this email.”
Kilimnik knew very well the importance Manafort attached to polling.
“Manafort is a guy who can merge, you know, strategy and messages into something that will work for victory,” Kilimnik told a reporter in 2018. “I’ve seen him work in different countries, and… he really does take seriously his polling and can spend, you know, two weeks going through the data, and he’ll come [up] with the best strategy you can ever have.”
Manafort on the Campaign Trail: Russia, Roger Stone, and the Promise of Wikileaks
On May 19th, Manafort was elevated to the position of campaign Chairman, replacing Corey Lewandowski, who was distrusted by the Trump children and despised by Michael Cohen and Roger Stone. Rick Gates also joined the Trump campaign as Manafort’s deputy.
Two days later, on May 21st, Manafort was contacted by a young and ambitious, if virtually unknown, Trump foreign policy advisor based out of London named George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos forwarded an email he had received from a Russian claiming to have contacts with the Foreign Ministry who were open to meeting with Trump.
“Russia has been eager to meet Mr. Trump for quite some time,” Papadopoulos wrote, “and have been reaching out to me to discuss.”
“We need someone to communicate that DT [Trump] is not doing these trips,” Manafort wrote, forwarding the email to Gates. “It should be someone low level on the campaign so as not to send any signal.”
No communications between Manafort and Kilimnik from May 7th to July 7th are publicly available, nor appear to have ever been unearthed by investigators. Nonetheless, Gates sent Kilimnik internal polling data throughout this time period.
On June 9th, Manafort participated in the infamous Trump Tower meeting, which will be covered at length in a separate series.
Three days after that meeting, Julian Assange announced during an interview on ITV that WikiLeaks would be publishing previously unreleased Hillary Clinton emails.
Two days after that, The Washington Post ran a story about how the cyber security firm CrowdStrike had assessed that Russian hackers had breached the DNC.
Interest within the Trump campaign in Clinton’s missing emails had been ramping up over the spring. Sometime in May, Roger Stone alerted Manafort and Gates that WikiLeaks would be releasing Clinton’s emails but didn’t provide an exact date for the release.
Throughout April and May, Stone spoke over the phone with Gates 67 times and with Manafort 64 times. Gates later testified that at Trump family meetings he attended, Donald Trump, Jr. regularly inquired about Hillary’s emails.
Other campaign officials Gates heard ask about the emails included Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, Corey Lewandowski, Senator Jeff Sessions, and Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis.
By June, Stone told Manafort that “a source close to WikiLeaks confirmed that WikiLeaks had the emails from Clinton’s server.”
Manafort instructed Gates to follow up with Stone “from time to time” to see if his WikiLeaks insider knowledge was “real and viable.”
Nor was it only individuals within the Trump campaign who were interested in the impending Wikileaks releases. Following Assange’s June 12th announcement, Gates spoke with Republican National Committee head Reince Priebus and later described the RNC as being “energized” by a potential WikiLeaks dump of Clinton emails. Based on a conversation he had with Manafort, Gates learned that the RNC was planning “to run the WikiLeaks issue to ground.”
In anticipation of the release, the RNC planned to issue press releases that would serve to amplify their political impact. Gates later told the FBI that the RNC “indicated they knew the timing of the upcoming releases.”
He claimed to be unaware of how the RNC could be in possession of this information.
It was around this time that Manafort, parroting a view held by Kilimnik and later pushed by Russian intelligence, pushed the false notion that the hack of the DNC was carried out by forces in Ukraine.
The view that the Russians were not responsible for the cyberattack was shared by the Trump campaign surrogate Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, whom Gates described as having more Russian contacts than even Manafort.
Flynn was “adamant” that the Russians didn’t carry out the hack because he doubted that US Intelligence was capable of determining who had conducted the hack.
Roger Stone, on the other hand, informed Gates that the hack might have been conducted by the Russians.
Manafort Offers Oleg Deripaska “Private Briefings”
Manafort’s history in Ukraine soon caused him problems. Already in April Manafort had told Hope Hicks to disregard questions sent by The Washington Post about his business relationships in Ukraine and with Oleg Deripaska.
On July 7th, Josh Kovensky, a reporter from the Kyiv Post, reached out to Manafort for comments regarding his past business activities, including the Pericles venture with Deripaska.
Manafort forwarded Kovensky’s inquiry to Kilimnik with an “FYI” and asked if there was “any movement on this issue with our friend?”
By “our friend,” Manafort was referring to Deripaska.
“I am carefully optimistic on the question of our biggest interest,” Kilimnik replied to Manafort.
“Our friend V [Boyarkin] said there is lately significantly more attention to the campaign in his boss’ [Deripaska’s] mind, and he will be most likely looking for ways to reach out to you pretty soon, understanding all the time sensitivity. I am more than sure that it will be resolved, and we will get back to the original relationship with V. ‘s boss.”
“[T]ell V[ictor Boyarkin’s] boss [Deripaska] that if he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote back to Kilimnik. Despite Manafort’s offer, he later denied ever having briefed Deripaska.
When Kovensky’s article was published the next day, Kilimnik emailed a copy to Manafort. Manafort responded saying that Kilimnik “should cover V[ictor Boyarkin] on this story and make certain that V understands this is all BS and the real facts are the ones we passed along last year.”
Despite the unavailability of communications between Manafort and Kilimnik, Kilimnik’s correspondence during this period indicates that he had insider knowledge regarding the Trump campaign. Kilimnik’s response to an email from Sam Patten sent in mid-July regarding the selection of Mike Pence as Trump’s choice for Vice President suggests that he was discussing these matters with Manafort contemporaneously as the decisions were being made.
“You know Paul,” Kilimnik wrote to Patten, “he is focused on winning the elections and then dealing with foreign policy or whatever. The choice of VP is purely electoral, as I understand.”